At 09:44 PM 5/14/2001 -0400, Nathan Russell wrote:
>However, that is still drawing a distinction between new and
>experienced users.
Well, so what if it does? It is an extremely minor difference. New users
would still get first time LL tests - it just means that they wouldn't get
exponents that someone else abandoned. It is an exponent thing, not a user
thing. Many organizations have distinctions for new members. Non-voting
members, provisional members, Fraternity pledges, etc. To a new user, what
does it matter if he gets a brand new exponent instead of one that someone
else abandoned in the same range? Why would a new user prefer an exponent
someone else abandoned over one that no one else has been assigned? To me,
it seems that (if anything) he would prefer a new one because there is a
possibility of the person who abandoned it getting back to work on it and
finishing it in the mean time.
> For that matter, if a milestone is delayed by a
>month or two, it doesn't significantly hurt everyone's overall odds of
>finding a prime.
I know, but it would be nice to know whether what seems to be M38 is or
isn't M38.
I can empathize with you here. However, I was a new user only a
>little over a year ago, and if someone had said on the mailing list at
>that time that new users should be given assignments chosen so that
>they couldn't harm milestones, I would have been upset.
They would still be contributing towards milestones. If there are
exponents below a milestone that never have been assigned, they would get
them.
>Yes, it would be nice to say that we know for sure which Mersenne
>prime is the thirty-eighth, but doing so does not speed us towards
>discovering the thirty-ninth.
But there could be one smaller than what now seems to be #38, because there
are exponents in that range that haven't had even 1 LL.
>For that matter, I am sure that there are users who have run a single
>exponent and then left,
Well, that's OK. Their work helps. Does anyone have an idea of the % of
people who start and then quit w/o finishing an assignment?
+------------------------------------+
| Jud McCranie |
| |
| former temporary part-time adjunct |
| instructor of a minor university |
+------------------------------------+
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